Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait Read Online Free PDF Page A

the morning sun slanting over his shoulder, one knee crossed over the other, the sketch pad on his lap. Amanda watched from where she knelt at his elbow, and Fleur…
    Fleur crossed one knee over the other—an unladylike pose, but effective for balancing a sketch pad—and glowered at Jenny as if to will Jenny’s image onto the page by visual imperative.
    “Your sister has beautiful eyebrows,” Mr. Harrison said to his audience. “They have the most graceful curve. It’s a family trait, I believe.”
    Amanda crouched closer. “Does that mean I have them too?”
    He glanced over at her, his expression utterly serious. “You do, though yours are a touch more dramatic. When you make your bows, gentlemen will write sonnets to the Carrington sisters’ eyebrows.”
    “Papa’s horse is Sonnet. Tell me some more.”
    While he spoke, his pencil moved over the page in short, light bursts of activity. “Notice the way Miss Fleur’s eyes, as beautiful as they are, aren’t pitched at exactly the same angle. Nobody’s face is perfectly symmetrical, not if you study them closely.”
    “What’s symmet—that word you said?”
    While Jenny sketched, and Fleur sat a little taller on her burgundy pillow, Mr. Harrison provided Amanda a concise, understandable explanation for symmetry, then went on and described the ways asymmetry made an image interesting.
    “Have you ever drawn a crow?” Amanda asked. “Or a pitcher?”
    “I’m sure I have. Crows are a challenge because they want you to think they’re black, but in the sun, they’re many colors.”
    From across the room, Jenny saw her nieces consider crows in a whole new manner, not as rough-voiced avian nuisances, but as peacocks in disguise.
    “So what do you do when you want to draw a crow?” Amanda’s nose was less than an inch from Mr. Harrison’s sleeve.
    His pencil did not stop moving, though Fleur was beginning to fidget now that her soon-to-be-legendary eyebrows were no longer under discussion.
    “I try to draw the crow as he sees himself. They’re curious fellows, flying about as if the entire world were available as their perch. I’ve seen a crow light on the back of a cow, for example, and the cow had nothing to say to it.”
    Amanda grinned, a child who might like to fly through the clouds and light on the back of a cow.
    “I’m curious too,” Fleur said. “I don’t want to sit on a cow. I want to sit on a pony.”
    “What would you name your pony?” Mr. Harrison asked.
    Jenny listened with half an ear to the earnest and protracted discussion that ensued. Naming a pony was apparently a holy undertaking in the opinion of her nieces, but then, their father was a former cavalry officer.
    As Jenny’s father was. Her pencil stopped moving, as her mind started a roll call of family members who’d served in the cavalry:
    His Grace; her uncle Tony; her oldest brother, Devlin St. Just; her brothers-by-marriage, Kesmore and Deene; her late brother, Bartholomew… Thoughts of Bart brought both grief and anger.
    And, of course, guilt.
    The clock chimed the quarter hour, prodding Jenny out of her reverie. Across the room, Elijah Harrison had made two conquests by virtue of simply talking with Fleur and Amanda. He’d glanced over at Jenny occasionally, his gaze amused and patient.
    While she had only fourteen more minutes to give vent to years of artistic frustration.
    And yet, when she looked down at the page twenty minutes later—Fleur would remain still no longer, not even with a book on her lap—Jenny had not sketched Mr. Harrison’s talented hands, or not just his hands.
    “Shall we have a critique session?” he asked as he rose. “I’m sure the young ladies would be happy to assist us.”
    His hand settled on Fleur’s dark curls, and the little girl went still beneath his touch—even Kesmore didn’t have that effect on his daughter—while Jenny felt her insides take flight. A critique session with Elijah Harrison?
    “I have used up my